“So … the complainers and traitors have won?” Newton asked.
“That, my friends, depends on Theophilus Holmes. Meanwhile, we have some time before he arrives. A couple of weeks, a month at most. Let’s make the best of it, shall we?”
He knocked off a salute, turning his mare and trotting off toward his home where Mollie and the children were waiting.
“Never seen a man with such faith in himself,” Newton muttered.
Butler nodded, clamping his eyes shut, seeing the nine deserters as muskets and shotgun blasts blew them apart. Exhausted and depressed, he swallowed hard, as if to choke off the horror.
Dear God, are they going to fill my dreams like the dying and maimed wretches from Shiloh?
“Oh, it will be all right, Hancock,” Newton assured him, clapping him on the back. “Sometimes I think you care too much. Join me. I’ll stand you for a whiskey in the bar.”
“No, I’m tired, Robert. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He turned, heading for his room. As his boots trod the carpet, the execution of the nine deserters kept running over and over in his head. This would be another night of twisting and turning, of nightmares filled with blood and terror.
Nine more helpless human beings. Add them to the growing tally of ghosts and demons.
“Dear God, Paw! I don’t want to die!” The boy’s scream—clear as a bell—was deafening in Butler’s head.
“Not my responsibility,” Butler whispered to himself.
But what happens when it finally is?
The voice seemed to whisper out of the very air.
A sob caught in his throat.
28
October 1, 1862
The problem with a field of corn, beans, and squash was that it couldn’t be moved. Sarah pondered that change of perspective. All of her life, she’d preferred farming because the field was right there, next to the house. You always knew exactly where to find it. Convenient and close at hand.
Unlike cattle, horses, or sheep that had to be followed around from one patch of grass to the next—or chickens or hogs that could wander off and get into trouble—plants just sat there, waiting to be watered and weeded, to have pests like hornworms picked off, and the raccoons kept at bay.
She had always thought planting safe and tidy.
War changed everything.
Fields, and their ripening crops, were impossible to hide. They sat naked and vulnerable to anyone passing on the road. And a lot of people had been passing since General Rains had ordered a Confederate cavalry regiment to be camped over at Cross Hollow, just south of Pea Ridge. Not only that, but new recruits were being brought in from Missouri and were being trained up at Elkhorn Tavern. Those were a lot of mouths to be fed.
Fed what?
And by whom?
The first ears of corn were ripening, the squash full, and pods of beans at the edge of maturation. Sarah had no illusions about how her field would look to half-famished soldiers.
If only she could figure out how to keep her harvest from being “requisitioned” by desperate Confederates with empty commissary wagons.
Her few chickens, one cow, and two horses at least had been shinnied up into the mountains where Billy shuttled them back and forth out of sight. A skill at which her brother was becoming most adept.
The fields, ripening in the new October sun, were now lush from the efforts of her hard work—and Billy’s, whenever he was around. It would be enough to keep her and Maw in high style through the winter, as well as provide enough of a surplus she could trade down in Fayetteville.
Assuming she could get her harvest safely past the soldiers and all the way to market. That meant driving a wagon full of food down the Telegraph Wire Road and right past the soldiers’ noses. Even if she could get her crop to Fayetteville and the staples back, the army would know she had two horses hidden somewhere, and that the wagon—now propped up and “broken”—was actually sound and worth taking.
“I hate this damn war,” she whispered, surprised that the profanity not only came with such ease, but that God didn’t strike her down with a lightning bolt for blasphemy. But then, after what she’d seen in the aftermath of the fight up on Pea Ridge, maybe everything she’d ever been told about God was a lie.
Word was that General Curtis and his Federals had marched clear over to Helena on the far side of the state. In the Union Army’s wake, General Hindman had taken cavalry up into Missouri, establishing a headquarters just across the border at Pineville. As a result, trickles of flour, molasses, salt, and sugar had been making their way up the line from Fort Smith and Van Buren, traded all the way across Texas. Clear from Mexico, of all places.
Sarah, more than anything, wanted a winter’s supply—especially the flour, sugar, salt, and molasses. Little Rock and its magical future had faded like a winter mist.
She wiped her sweaty face, glancing out at the road where a lone horseman appeared from the trees, apparently on his way north from the ruins of Van Winkle’s mill. The Federals had destroyed the mill just before they pulled out, thinking it to be a meeting place for Confederate bushwhackers. A lot of mills—unless they’d declared themselves Union—had been destroyed. Almost a third of them. And now the tannery was gone, too.
She glanced speculatively at her corn, then back at the rider who had stopped short where the Hancock farm lane turned off the Huntsville Road.
She murmured, “Just keep going, mister. We ain’t got nothing here for you.”
From his gray outfit and slouch hat, he was a Confederate officer. Following in his wake came the sound of more horses. Moments later a small band of cavalry appeared out of the trees, the distant clatter of their approach barely audible over the White River’s soft hush.
Sarah took a deep breath. It wasn’t that unusual
